Thursday, February 08, 2007

I’m at the computer writing and listening to the radio when around noon the announcement about Anna Nicole Smith being found dead in her hotel room comes. I’m not surprised for a variety of reasons and I continue working. About an hour later, as I’m fixing lunch I switch on MSNBC and to my horror they’ve got wall to wall coverage of her death. Then I switch over to CNN and damned if Wolf Blitzer and his team aren’t doing the same damned thing. He’s got their house doctor speculating on how she may have died, as if he’s psychic, instead of being professional and waiting until they had the facts. The local news had scrambled a helicopter so they could get footage of her body. I’d expect this from the tabloid media, but NEVER from mainstream media (i.e. Professional news departments), worse than that, there was no hint of guilt. They all jumped on this story like…flies on shit.

Can any professional journalist or news person answer these questions?

Can you name ONE movie that she starred in?

Other than the Playmate of the Year (Playboy), what significant achievement had she accomplished?

If she had not married a 92 year old Texas Billionaire, would she have captured the imagination of the media?

What did Anna Nicole Smith do to warrant a helicopter fly-over to photograph her dead body being loaded into an ambulance?

For those of you who are of average intelligence, you already know the answer but for you professional journalist/serious reporter types, let me give you the answer:

NOTHING.

Not a goddamned thing. The only reason Anna Nicole Smith was famous is because the MEDIA decided she was good for business. Without Anna, there’d be no Paris Hilton, another vapid, drug-addled, no-talent skank. Cold blooded? You bet! Anna Nicole Smith sold her soul to the only thing worse than Satan – the Hollywood Entertainment Industrial Complex. She didn’t care who or what she had to do to stay in the small spotlight she was in. Her “Reality Show” was a depiction of a brain-damaged woman walking around in Hollywood, the only place in the world where nobody noticed nor cared about her obvious handicap, a town where intelligent people make decisions that only someone with a serious brain injury would make. Instead of getting this woman serious help, they made it into entertainment and then everyone else could Yuk it up. Then she had plastic surgery and then endorsed a diet supplement for big bucks, at least until she put weight back on. Then she dropped out of the spotlight for a while only to drop back into it when her sun died from drug-related complications. She then used her son’s death to pull that spotlight back onto herself, granting interviews to “The Insider” and “Entertainment Tonight” (ET) as well as MSNBC, FOX and CNN. She was oblivious to the fact that this spotlight showed that she had surrounded herself with people who obviously didn’t have her best interest (health) at heart. In the last week before she died. ET and the Insider both were in her face, asking her if her new husband had murdered her teenaged son. They were grilling her hard to. Like she was some kind of master criminal, I mean the USC marching band could have come into her hospital room and killed her son with a chainsaw while playing the theme to Shaft and she wouldn’t have caught on.

But she did understand what they were accusing her of. So she hit the meds, maybe the booze too. I don’t know. Maybe she tripped and fell. I will wait and see what the cause of death is.

The thing about this goes back to my central problem with the news media. I never saw the Vice President grilled like Anna Nicole Smith was by ET. I’ve never seen any public official in the last 15 years get a serious interrogation like Ms. Smith received. She was a NOBODY, at best a Playboy Playmate; she never controlled the fate of millions of people. Her finger was nowhere near the nuclear button; she never sent men off to war or raised our taxes. She didn’t cure disease, she didn’t write laws; defend the poor or even act. Yet she was a star, a D-List star, but a star and only because the media said so. So the media made her and then killed her.

This over-coverage is a form of misdirection, they’re diverting our attention to the real culprits behind her death – them. The media killed a stupid woman today. A woman who was maybe intellectually 10 years old. Did they head off a war? No. Did they uncover a great fraud? No. Uncover government waste? No.